


with wings, falling

by skyparents



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Post-Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Somewhat a character study for Hope, minor appearances by other characters - Freeform, there's just a lot going on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29913396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyparents/pseuds/skyparents
Summary: hope struggles, usually, with how to express her feelings. she's not good at the romantic, flowery language that makes up poetry and music. scott goes for simple and it comes across precious and cute, accompanied by a crooked little smile and twinkling eyes, and it makes her heart swell in her chest. but when hope goes for simple, it comes out... wrong. too harsh, sharp edges and corners. simple, yes – but vaguely emotionless, as if she feels detached. which she doesn't. she's felt detached from things for long enough to recognize when she's not.or, hope navigates her relationship with scott over time.
Relationships: Minor Hank Pym/Janet van Dyne - Relationship, Scott Lang/Hope Van Dyne
Comments: 15
Kudos: 29





	with wings, falling

**Author's Note:**

> it's been a hot minute since i wrote anything for scotthope (or, realistically, any fic at all), and so i wanted to finally get back into it! brought to you by a very sad headcanon i had that one time when i caused a minor breakdown for some of my amatw mutuals on twitter. i literally finished writing this five minutes ago and haven't read over it at all, so bear with me if something doesn't make sense, we're going in with zero editing. the flow of this is sort of all over the place, so lemme apologize in advance. still, i hope y'all like it!
> 
> dedicated to the new era of scotthope shippers i've started following on twitter. ily all. also, to the scotthope founding fathers (jan, el, and lisa) for making me actually write the thing.

It has been a long day, and by the time she kicks off her heels in the front hallway of her apartment, she’s exhausted. And  _ still, _ when her phone lights up with a text message –  _ Dinner? _ with three blushing smiley faces in a row, and she doesn’t think she’s ever known someone who uses as many emojis as Scott Lang – she finds herself agreeing.

The thing is, when she’s upset, she doesn’t talk about it. She just shuts down. Hope van Dyne is not one to break down her feelings until she can step back and see the bigger picture. Maybe if she had been raised by her mother instead of an absent father and a host of boarding school teachers, she would be a little more in touch with how to do that. But her mother shrank between the cold metal plating of a missile and sent it down into the sea, and so this is the way Hope handles her emotions.

Scott learned this early on, in the weeks after he became Ant-Man – and learned, too, that poking and prodding at her to talk about it is mostly ineffective. She’s sort of prickly on a good day (he said this out loud, once, and she glared daggers at him and he has never said it to her again), and when she’s on edge, it’s only more difficult to soften her. So instead, he tries other tactics. Acts like everything is normal because he knows by now that’s what she wants, that it makes her feel safer, more secure, more stable-footed. Tries to do little things to cheer her up, or at least to just remind her that he loves her.

(She knows that’s what it is, really, though he hasn’t said the actual words yet. It’s as if he doesn’t want to scare her, knows she will close off if he says it too soon, and so is simply waiting, patiently,  _ patiently, _ for her to be ready for it.)

Sometimes, like tonight, he invites her over for dinner. Hope can’t cook, is hopeless (ha!) at it, and Scott was decent before prison and improved an awful lot over the long hours upon hours upon days upon months of house arrest, later. He perfected her favourite meals then. He doesn’t say it, but she thinks it made him feel closer to her when she and Hank disappeared.

At the curb in front of his house, Hope curls her fingers tighter around the steering wheel. He’s turned the light on at the door for her, and it shouldn’t make the very edges of her dark-cloud mood begin to melt, but it does. Scott tugs her into the house when she makes it up the steps, pressing her back to the wall to kiss her and then spinning away back into the kitchen, where their food is almost ready. The smell of it fills the house up and it’s one of her favourites, one of those dishes that she has noticed a telltale improvement to between  _ then _ and  _ now. _ The corners of her mouth pull upward before she can stop them.

If he notices this when she trails after him to the kitchen, he doesn’t say so. What he  _ does _ say is, “That hoodie looks  _ way _ better on you than me. And I made it look pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.” He catches her gaze; she smirks, and he gives one of those thousand-watt smiles, and he turns back to the stove.

She didn’t ask, when she started to pilfer clothing items from his closet. It surprised her how early on she did it, the way she just tumbled headlong into a habit like that.

He didn’t notice at first, because it was so subtle. Something would go missing and she would only wear it when she was by herself, because  _ maybe _ it made her miss him a little less, and wasn’t that embarrassing? Eventually, he would find it somewhere in her apartment and assume he had just left it there to begin with. If he caught onto the fact that it had disappeared on him at all. Which he only did  _ sometimes. _ Hope very purposefully kept it from being obvious, kept it to herself. Telling him that she wore his T-shirt when he wasn’t there and she couldn’t sleep?  _ Way _ too mushy to handle.

So some of it, he never learned Hope had taken at all.

He went giant-size at that airport in Germany and ended up under house arrest, and she went radio silent on him, and the T-shirts and hoodies and that one pair of sweatpants? They just stayed with her. She couldn’t bring herself to leave them behind entirely, just folded them neatly into a bag and stashed it in a corner of the traveling lab. Didn’t wear them anymore. Just let them sit there, untouched, and returned them to him only after the whole Ghost incident.

Standing in his kitchen now, her memory flashes back to the crinkle of the plastic when he moved it aside to see what the bag held. She remembers the twist to the set of his mouth before he looked back up to her. He didn’t say anything about it then, but the hoodie and one of the T-shirts appeared back with her things at her parents’ house later, and she’s not the one who put them there.

After dinner, she feels better. The long, sort of awful day has faded and been replaced with Scott, who has this tendency to take up all of her attention.

Hope struggles, usually, with how to express her feelings. She’s not good at the romantic, flowery language that makes up poetry and music.  _ Love _ is a hard word for her to wrap her mind around. Scott goes for simple and it comes across precious and cute, accompanied by a trademark crooked little smile and twinkling eyes, and it makes her heart swell in her chest. But when  _ Hope _ goes for simple, trying to follow his lead, it comes out… wrong. Too harsh, sharp edges and corners on every letter. Simple, yes – but vaguely emotionless, as if she feels detached.

Which she doesn’t. She’s felt detached from things for long enough to recognize when she’s not.

In an effort to make up for this, she settles on touch: Tries to pour all that she’s feeling into a kiss, trails her fingers over his shoulder blades and presses all the places that have become familiar with time, and hopes that’s enough. This is not, typically at least, soft. She shies away from falling asleep with her head on Scott’s chest, or holding his hand in public, or letting him slip his arm around her shoulders while they watch a movie. That screams too much vulnerability, getting  _ comfortable _ in her weakness for him.

Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? A weakness. A chink in the armour she has built for herself over the years, slowly widening with Scott, and the reparation of her relationship with her father, and Scott, and the way her mother hugged her in the lab like the missing piece of a puzzle, and Scott, and the slow winding of everyone he cares about into  _ her _ life, and  _ Scott. _

Four days later, everything in the world shifts.

It happens before she has the chance to navigate her feelings and how absolutely tangled up they are in Scott Lang. She stands with her mother on one side and her father on the other (”Going subatomic in five, four, three, two, one”) and pushes a lever forward, watches Scott shrink into the quantum tunnel, and never sees him come back.

She doesn’t have the time to unpack this as it happens, and if it weren’t for the way that she  _ saw _ her own limbs and her parents’ bodies begin to flake away, she might think no time has passed. But when she finds herself standing on the roof of that building again, Luis’ van and the miniature quantum tunnel and all their equipment are nowhere in sight, and Scott isn’t there, and the glimpse she can catch of San Francisco stretching out beneath her is decidedly different. Hope has barely reached for her parents’ hands – automatic, like getting her mother back to full size has made her revert back to seven years old again – when an unfamiliar woman appears and recruits her to leap through a tiny orange hoop onto a battlefield. Someone else might hesitate; Hope does not. She dives into action, ready for the fight even though she doesn’t yet know who or what she is meant to be fighting.

And somehow, Scott is there. She spots him over the heads of an overwhelming number of other people – it would be hard not to, at the height he has grown to – and it feels like her heart skips a beat and her stomach drops and her breath catches all in the same moment, and this is  _ not the time. _

But he’s not stuck in the Quantum Realm for thirty-one years like her mother, like Hope thought for that split second between realizing the van was gone and that maybe-magician appearing to teleport her here. To the sort of battle that feels like it  _ matters, _ not just to her or the people she knows but to everyone, everything, forever. To this orange-tinted place where this many people – every superhero the planet has ever heard of and a whole host of ones whose names and faces are unfamiliar – have stepped through portals like her to fight side by side.

To  _ Scott. _ It’s as if everything she has done since they met has revolved around him somehow.

The battle is chaos. She loses track of Scott, for the most part. It’s a free for all, fighting side by side with people she does not know against an enemy she does not know a lot about. After so much time working either independently or with Scott and  _ only Scott, _ this is an odd adjustment. But the sorcerer who has brought her here explained on that San Francisco rooftop the very basics – Thanos and the stones and the time stretching out between now and the last time Hope breathed. It’s enough to keep afloat, enough to keep herself alive.

Somewhere, the van’s horn, obnoxious and familiar, echoes across the battlefield. Maybe someone who doesn’t know its tune wouldn’t notice it amidst the noise of the fight itself, but it draws Hope’s attention so immediately that she nearly takes a hit that she ordinarily would have seen coming a mile away.

Over the comm in her suit, she can catch the plan: They need to get the miniature quantum tunnel open again. When did she get on a shared frequency with everyone, anyway? Everything is a blur. Somehow, in the rush of everything else, her eyes find Scott, and she’s in the air. Lands next to him with her hand on his shoulder (“We’re on it, Cap”), and he smiles at her and she smiles back, and for a moment it’s as if the entire scene around them has reached a standstill.

And then it carries on, and they snap back into action, accustomed to working in this sort of partnership. They shrink together, her wings fluttering, and when he leaps, he knows that she will catch him.

The van has changed. Aged, really. Hope has the barest of moments to acknowledge this, partially from a very clear passage of time, partially from the battle raging around it. Twisting to look behind the seats, she tries to make sense of the way the tunnel’s mechanisms have been tossed around. “It’s a mess back here,” she manages, and God, is that really the first sentence she says  _ to _ Scott aloud?

“It’s dead.” Hope spins back to face him, eyes wide. “It’s dead. I have to hotwire it.” And he’s already doing it, pulling the wires out into the open and getting to work. She feels this bemusing, bewildering rush of affection now, for the way she has fallen for an actual criminal, someone who knows how to hotwire a car because he has  _ done it before, _ and who can keep his cool in the middle of everything going on around them to focus on the incredibly precise nature of it. They don’t have the time for her to linger on this for any longer than a moment, and she squeezes between the seats into the back of the van to try and fix up the tunnel. When the engine finally starts up, it’s to exhausted battle-heavy relief on both of their parts; neither of them can take more than two seconds for it before Hope hops out of the van and into the fray again.

She falls in around a newcomer she doesn’t know, side by side with anyone they can spare to help protect the glove and the stones. Hope really only got the bare minimum going into this; Scott tried to explain some of the finer details while he was hotwiring the van, but the stress and adrenaline made his mind move faster than his mouth. And after everything, the tunnel is destroyed with one well-aimed strike when Thanos figures out where they’re headed.

Hope knows when it happens, the moment the tide turns, the moment they win.

She doesn’t see Tony Stark snap his fingers, but she sees the soldier she is fighting crumble into dust, right there in front of her eyes, and she knows.

It’s then, in the quiet moments where everyone stops to catch their breath, that she searches again for Scott.

He stumbles a little as he moves towards her, all the adrenaline seeping out of his body now that it’s over, but it doesn’t matter because then they’re close enough that she can reach out to touch him. The first brush of contact grounds her, Scott’s arms are around her waist and Hope’s arms are around his shoulders. Boldly, he lifts her up from the dirt to spin her in a circle, only he loses his balance and they tumble together. She would laugh here, if she felt like she could. But their enemies are dust in the air and their allies are gathering in loose knots where Tony ended it all, and her parents are waiting on a rooftop across the country to find out if she’s still alive, and all she can really do is hold onto Scott and let his presence remind her that they  _ won. _

It comes at a terrible cost, and they all know it. There is no lightening the losses that cannot be undone. On some level, it feels wrong to celebrate alongside the rest of the world and their fireworks and their parades. She sits on the front steps with Scott’s hand in hers and a five-years-older Cassie with her head tilted back to look at the bright colours exploding in the sky. She dresses in all black to stand at the side of a lake with everyone who knew Tony Stark.

When Hope places all of these images side by side with the dusty orange battlefield in upstate New York, nothing makes sense.

She cries a lot, in the aftermath. Wishes she didn’t, but she can’t seem to stop once she starts. She curls into a ball on Scott’s couch, knees drawn up to her chest, box of tissues on the coffee table where she doesn’t even reach for them. He’s been carrying boxes upstairs from the storage locker the van got towed to five years ago; Kurt and Dave kept the house, with definite assistance from Maggie, though she seems determined not to take credit for it.

On his next trip through the living room, he pauses before her, uncertain. “Hope?” he asks softly.

“I’m sorry,” is all she can manage to get out. It feels heavy, choked, ashen on her tongue. Scott tilts his head questioningly and she shakes hers, takes a deep shaky breath and barrels onward. This has been weighing her down for days now and the old Hope would have held it in for an eternity, but she needs to say it, doesn’t she? He has to  _ hear _ it. “I’m sorry I couldn’t pull you out, and you were stuck in there for five  _ years, _ and I know you said it only felt like a few hours, but I just –”

Scott sinks down onto the couch next to her. “Hope,” he repeats hoarsely. His hands are in her hair and he’s trying to look her in the eyes, but she won’t hold eye contact, still rambling on repetitively. “Hope, listen to me,” he says over her, “it’s okay, it wasn’t your fault.”

Deep down, maybe she knows that. But she can’t stop apologizing,  _ I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. _ There’s that little seed of doubt growing in the shadows – that her legs went first, and maybe she had  _ just _ enough time to pull the lever and get him back with two feet on solid ground. Maybe if she hadn’t been so confused, or if she hadn’t been so focused on her parents, she could have brought Scott back before she disappeared.  _ She _ would have been gone, the same as always, but Cassie would have had him for the five years she missed out on. Except that then there’s a chance that he would have been dusted, too, and what then?

She isn’t sure how to answer that.

It’s hard to place the exact moment when life goes back to normal. Or maybe it’s gradual, and so pinpointing it is simply impossible. But Hope knows the moment when she realizes it  _ has. _ Scott’s eyes light up, hand reaching for hers. “Come outside with me,” he says, very suddenly.

It’s already dark out, and there are raindrops drumming steadily on the roof. “It’s raining,” she objects.

“That’s the whole entire point, Hope,” he nods wisely, tugging her up onto her feet and towards the door. “We have to go outside and dance in the rain!”

Begrudgingly, Hope follows him outside, right into the middle of the street. “You’re insane,” she murmurs when he pulls her close, but she links her hands together at the back of his neck anyway. They waltz, not particularly well or particularly gracefully, but Scott learned (sort of) years ago when he married Maggie, and Hope at least knows enough to prevent her feet from being stepped on. He spins her and even with the wet pavement, this time they do not tumble down to the ground.

Finally, rain-drenched, they step back into the house. “I’m  _ soaked,” _ Hope complains in the front hallway, wringing the water out from her braid. Everything she’s wearing carries rain, seeped into every bit of fabric.

Scott grins, that crooked smile she’s seen countless times now but maybe will never get tired of. “That’s the best part of dancing in the rain, Hope,” he informs her, moving in close to her so that she steps back, until her back is against the door. “We’ll just have to change out of these clothes, huh?” And his hands slide underneath her shirt, somehow already warm against her cold skin, and her breath hitches in her throat, and he leans down to kiss her.

So maybe everything is back to normal, after all. In the end.

She still struggles with how to express her feelings, probably always will. But in the  _ after, _ things change.

Maybe it’s something about the undeniable fact that they have missed so much  _ time. _ That neither of them  _ feel _ like they have skipped over a handful of years in the blink of an eye, not with the way it happened to them, specifically – but there is still the knowledge ticking away in the back of her head and, she thinks, in his, too. That he was stuck in the Quantum Realm and she disintegrated into dust on a sunlit rooftop, and the world carried right along without them.

So in the aftermath, when everything is back to quote-unquote  _ normal, _ Hope finds herself reaching for him more often. Her eyes seek him out the moment he enters a room. All the tension in her shoulders floods away when he laughs. She tangles her fingers with his here, brushes his shoulder with hers when she moves past him in the kitchen there, accidentally-on-purpose, like she’s just trying to reassure herself that he’s there.

(That  _ she’s _ here, too.)

She’s still not good with words, can only vocalize how much she loves him on some days, but she’s getting closer. It happens in baby steps. Next, she’ll curl her entire body into his side while he sleeps, and she will feel  _ comfortable _ there. She will feel like she belongs there.

**Author's Note:**

> oof. this was gonna be a short oneshot and then somehow wound up being almost 3500 words? i hope you liked it! i am hoping that the energy from finishing and actually posting this will kick my fic-writing brain into gear for the unfinished projects i have kicking around on my laptop and phone, so hopefully i'll see y'all again soon with another fic or something. in the meantime, if you have a minute to leave comments or kudos, i would appreciate that so much! or you can always come yell at me on twitter (@deboceans), too!


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